Aim of this work is to provide evidence of the effectiveness of combined use of the variable guide vanes (VGVs) and bleed air on the thermodynamic performance of aircraft engine system. This paper performed the comparative study to evaluate the overall thermal performance of an aircraft engine with optimized VGVs and bleed air, separately or simultaneously. The low-bypass ratio turbofan engine has been modeled with a 0D/1D modeling approach. The genetic algorithm is employed to find the optimum schedule of VGVs and bleed air. There are four types of design variables: (1) the inlet guide vane (IGV) angle, (2) the IGV and 1st stator vane (SV) angles, (3) bleed air mass flow rate at the exit of the axial compressor, and (4) both type 2 and type 3. The optimization is conducted with surge margin constraints of more than 10% and 15% in the axial compressor. The results show that the additional use of the bleed air increases the efficiency of the compressors. Overall, the percentage reductions of the total fuel consumption for the engine with the IGV, 1st SV and bleed air schedule is 1.63% for 15% surge margin constraints when compared with the engine with the IGV schedule. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.